Jiffy Lube / Day Care: Made in Seattle

Alex Tulinsky

The building sits on 25th Avenue N.E. adjacent to U Village, amid a typical American automobile-oriented “strip” landscape. Not a preconceived design, this building is an urban aggregation. At street level, a Jiffy Lube oil-change shop; underneath, a bilingual day-care preschool.

The unusual platform-like structure has an expansive parking lot on top, level with 25^th Ave. N.E., convenient for the high-traffic Jiffy Lube. Toward the east the ground falls away, so that the rear of the structure frames a one-story facade facing the opposite direction of the Jiffy Lube. This space houses the day-care center. This is aggregation at a large scale: two quite different structures and two quite different programs.

Another, smaller scale of aggregation is also present. At the Jiffy Lube, a covered work area has been added in the parking lot to the north of the building. Note the oil extraction device standing ready. At the school, a play area was carved out of the adjacent parking lot and fenced in. The fence was lined with plastic material at the eye-level of a pre-schooler, in an attractive geometric pattern, to block the distracting view out.

movement@montlake

Brian Monwai

The pace of movement in contemporary urban life at times runs quickly, at other times slowly. We spend a lot of time hurrying from place to place -- whether by car, by bicycle, or on foot. Sometimes we find ourselves standing still against a backdrop of people rushing by.

The direction of movement can travel in parallel lines as in a freeway, in the overlapping, criss-crossing layers of an overpass, or in a randomly dissipating cloud like smoke from a smokestack. People – strangers and friends -- form an aggregate by coming together intentionally or unintentionally, with similar or dissimilar destinations when they depart. Signage may attempt to direct the flow of movement, but most of the everyday urban movement remains uncontrolled.

The Montlake area of Seattle is a hub of variegated patterns of movement. Bus riders, automobiles, gymnasts and their fans, and bicyclists are a sampling of agents in motion. Not shown are the myriad float-planes, automobile exhaust plumes, buses, crows, and joggers that form the dynamic texture of Montlake.

This project was also an experiment at methods of capturing a sense of movement with still pictures. Notes: while the panhandler and speed limit/your speed pictures were not taken at Montlake, they helped illustrate the nuances of urban movement. The pictures in the photo mosaic were also taken from the expanded Seattle area. The mosaic was assembled with AndreaMosaic software.

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Tukwila: A River Runs Through It

Helen J. Wilson

For over 150 years, Tukwila has come of age around three themes: History, Transportation, and the Duwamish River. A panorama of the community’s past can be seen from the Interurban/Green River Bicycle Trail, which hugs the banks of the river as it loops and curves 13 miles through the heart of the city. Wayside markers, art installations, and parks commemorate successive waves of human arrival, and how they traveled through the landscape. In anticipation of its centennial in 2008, a historian was commissioned to record the city’s past for publication. On the trail with the book in hand, scene after scene comes alive with tribal legend, and stories of the early pioneers. As the inhabitants went from canoeing on the river to flying through on the interstate, different kinds of transportation modes have come and gone, leaving layers of artifacts to mark their passing. Tukwila has expended great effort to give voice to the myriad cultures that have influenced its landscape. As can be seen from the trail, it has fearlessly blended nature and industry to create a phenomenon that is part museum, part wilderness, and part art gallery. Come see landscape urbanism and historic preservation at its finest.


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Insurgent Public Space: Spontaneous Vendor Food in Parking Lots

Szu-Yu Huang

Eating on board of a taco truck has been a favored topic around Puget Sound Region. The automobile culture has rooted American lifestyle since mid-20 century. However, the well equipped vehicles that carry food and serve hot dishes on boards have merged an innovative perspective of consuming food in public and have changed the usual use of parking lot and gas station corners. The exploration took six sites in Seattle metropolitan area, qualitative observations and brief interviews were conducted on site.

The taco truck urban landscape is intriguing, a segment of aggregate urban landscape, a juxtaposition of formal and informal, permanent and ephemeral use, as well as designed and impromptu activity. The purpose of this study focuses on what the influence of having food vendors in public realm are, how taco truck establishes its business legally in urban setting, and what types of sociocultural phenomena are usually associated with taco-truck can be found in the urban landscape.

The looseness characteristic of parking lot attracts unplanned business to establish its activity. Inasmuch as the concern of public health, governmental regulation reinforces the safety of food handling process and serving condition of vender food, such as taco truck. The energy of vibrant social interaction and dynamic cultural exchange flows in the insurgent public space-- taco truck on a parking lot.

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